Our Next Movie Challenge: The Best of Science Fiction

So, as it turns out I'm not very good at writing blog posts about all the awesome stuff I do (though I did take lots of pictures of my Halloween costume as I made it, so maybe that will become a post someday!). But, there are a couple things I am good at. Like watching movies and making spreadsheets.

Therefore, I proudly present to you the next O'Saurus Family movie challenge. We've tasked ourselves with watching the 100 best science fiction films of all time. There are lots of lists of these films, and they are not all the same. We decided to go to experts (which is our default mode for most things), and found a very recent list compiled from sci-fi experts, filmmakers, science fiction writers, film critics, and actual scientists (TimeOut London 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies). Then we started saying "but what about X movie??", so we kept looking around and made a list of 10 "Honorable Mentions" (mostly from this io9 post: Classic Science Fiction Movies Everyone Should See). Mr. O'Saurus says we are gluttons for punishment. I say "bring it on!" I've been meaning to watch all of these classic and critically acclaimed movies forever, and this is the perfect excuse. My dad would be super proud of this endeavor. I predict that it will take about a year to finish. We're going to watch them in no particular order, but probably 2 at a time. We've tried to make a list of pairs of films that make sense together, but we're not bound to stick to it.

Below you'll find an info-graphic about the movies we are planning to watch (click here to see the info-graphic by itself). There are so many cool things to talk about, even before we watch the movies! One of the things we tried to do is categorize the movies into sub-genres of science fiction. This was really really hard. Most of the movies fall into more than one sub-genre, and we haven't seen them all yet. So a lot of them are best-guesses, or they are us trying to pick the most central sub-genre out of many. The sub-genres we considered are defined here:

Space Opera: This refers to those science fiction adventure films that usually span multiple planets and have multiple alien races. The science is usually secondary to the story.
Dystopia: Characterized by societies that revolve around human suffering. They usually involve some social or technological idea carried to the absolute extreme.
In Space: These are movies that take place entirely (or almost entirely) in a space craft.
On Another World!: Whether exploring the land itself, or dealing the the creatures found there, the defining feature of these movies is that they take place on a planet that's not Earth.
Time Travel: Flying in the face of Stephen Hawking, these are movies in which a major plot point involves moving through time in a non-linear fashion.
Science Experiment Goes Awry: This was something of a catch-all category, because it includes stories where scientists create inventions and deal with the repercussions, or stories where scientists make a discovery that then has a profound effect on humanity.
Aliens on Earth!: This category includes all instances of an alien species visiting or contacting the planet Earth, whether they come in peace or not, whether they've been here for millennia or just arrived.
Hell if we know: There were a few movies that we just had no idea how to categorize, because we haven't seen them and the descriptions are too vague, or because they just really don't fit into any of these.

Unlike the Disney movie challenge, this time we're going to rate movies as we watch them. Hopefully, this will result in a really fun and interesting final list of our personal rankings of the top one hundred (and ten) science fiction films of all time! Stay tuned!

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